Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to inventory management in a data center and more particularly to locating physical resources in a data center.
Description of the Related Art
A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. The typical data center generally includes not only a multiplicity of servers, both stand alone and rackmount, but also communication switching devices, redundant or backup power supplies, environmental controls including air conditioning and fire suppression and security devices. Oftentimes, different sets of servers and associated switches are stored in cabinets within the data center or on racks in the data center, with those cabinets or racks organized in rows just as may be the case with bookshelves in a library.
In any datacenter environment, it is necessary to locate a particular physical hardware device for several reasons—for example, to address a fault or other condition accessible only through direct physical access to the hardware device. However, the location of a hardware device in a datacenter can differ from a specific rack or cabinet number in a particular location, to a slot within a chassis located in a specific rack or cabinet in a particular location. Current solutions address the complexity of locating individual hardware components in the data center through the utilization of several technologies such as universal product codes (UPC) and radiofrequency identification (RFID) tags. These methods require the personnel to carry a device to read the UPC or RFID values, as they are not generally human-readable. Methods such as RFID also suffer from the problem of having multiple responses to a local read, since many tags will respond to a read action from the user. UPC suffers from the requirement of having to scan each code individually, which requires the personnel to scan multiple systems to find the specific one being sought.
As a more general method of locating elements in the data center without a specific identification tag, visual indicators, such as LEDs may be illuminated to draw attention to components in need of service. Even still, these lights may be lost in the sea of other status and activity LEDs that are commonly present on the front and back panels of a data center device.